On Friday, the administration announced that the university, home to some of the most high-profile protests against Israel and its war in Gaza following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, would be losing $400 million in federal funding, due to “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Over the weekend, Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder and graduate student at the university who has been prominently involved in campus protests and began preparations to deport him. The department alleged online that he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” a claim repeated by several administration officials, including the president, as they boasted about his arrest.
In actuality, these developments are not about fighting antisemitism or, for that matter, keeping Jews safe. Rather, this appears to me to be a cynical ploy by an administration full of people who promote and enable antisemitic conspiracies that is fixated on attacking higher education, free speech, free assembly, and immigration and due process norms by using Jews, Jewish fear, and antisemitism as pretense to do that.
There are, of course, Jews in this country who very vocally disagree, and who, by all accounts, sincerely believe that the protests that have raged on college campuses over the last year are hotbeds of antisemitism and that cutting funding from universities and deporting students is indeed the right way to respond.
I am not writing this to argue that these individuals and groups are insincere, or not genuinely worried about antisemitism on campus, or that theirs is not a Jewish view. It is. However cynically the administration might be in its use of antisemitism, I know that there are those who are not only genuinely concerned by it, but genuinely believe that the approach the administration is currently taking is the right one.
“This phenomenon is very real,” Ilan Goldenberg, former national director of Jewish outreach of the Harris-Walz campaign told me. American Jews are concerned. Some campuses do have real problems and there are some students who cross the line into antisemitism. “But this is just not going to solve that problem.”
Goldenberg added that taking resources from a university and saying it is doing so for the good of Jews risks adding fuel to antisemitic fire. As Pollock put it, the grants and contracts are “from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and Department of Education, and other federal offices,” which is to say that the funding will be cut from scientific and medical research. I do not think that cutting federal research money from the National Institutes of Health and announcing that that research can no longer be carried out because of Jews is particularly good for Jews. “It’s going to make these students targets,” Goldenberg said.
Suspending funding and trying to deport a green card holder are not the same, but both cases involve an apparent disregard for due process. That a Jewish group or even groups says that something is good or bad for the fight against antisemitism does not necessarily make it so. But there is, I think, a reason that numerous Jewish groups that have spoken out against the Trump administration’s actions at Columbia—from the IfNotNow movement for “equality, justice, and a thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis” and the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace to Amy Spitalnick, focused on democracy at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, to progressive, domestically focused groups like Bend the Arc and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, to Nexus, which works on combating antisemitism and protecting free speech (and with whose task force of academics, in the interest of full disclosure, I work as a fellow)—have stressed the threat that these moves pose to the norms that keep ours a liberal, pluralistic democracy, with protections that keep Jews safe.
What would make Jews safer? What would it look like to fight against antisemitism? It would involve investing in, not attacking, education. It would mean trying to bring communities together instead of pitting them against one another. It would involve those in the most powerful offices in the country attacking conspiracies instead of elevating them. And, as Goldenberg said, it would mean creating space for discussions around Israel in which people could “decouple the discussion on Israel from the discussion on American Jews.” The administration is doing the opposite of that and, in fairness, so, too, are some American Jews and Jewish organizations. But as with cheering on the crackdown at Columbia, that doesn’t make it an effective way to fight antisemitism.
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